It has long been known that the rolling of lawns is beneficial in grooming lawns for both short term and long term benefits. It is particularly important to roll lawns in such critical areas as golf greens and formal gardens, etc.
However the prior art is deficient in several ways. Roller attachments carried by lawn mowers, either power driven or manually pushed tend to complicate the machinery and significantly increase the cost of the mowers. Although some large and expensive commercial mowers may provide lawn rollers, it is particularly difficult to find roller attachments for small-sized, hand-steered-from-the-rear types of lawn mowers of the kind that are quite useful for homes and in small grassy areas of golf greens or formal gardens. The smaller inexpensive mowers that are in use for home lawns have not conventionally had any provisions for attachment of roller accessories.
As a matter of fact, even when rollers are provided on lawn mowers they may be detrimental to lawn grooming rather than beneficial. That is because there is rarely any provision for mowing without rolling at the same time. Conventionally the rollers themselves have constituted the mower drive wheels in power driven mowers, for example.
Such mowers with fixed in place rollers under some widely used methods of cutting and grooming lawns tend to end up with an unkempt appearance and a grainy structure that is unacceptable for example on golf greens. Consider the problems they introduce when the special grooming method of double mowing in criss-cross patterns is used to reduce the graininess caused in particular when mower rotary blades get dull or under other special conditions causing the blades to knock over the grass stems temporarily, so that they can later by the "Lazarus" effect revive and destroy the effect of an evenly trimmed grass length, or a carefully groomed grain pattern, so important for example on golf greens.
Consider the adverse role that the continuously engaged lawn roller has in this respect. In the first of two swaths in the popular criss-cross double-cut pattern, if a roller is used it tends to crease the grass stems which are not cut off against the ground long enough that the second swath does not encounter stiffly standing grass stems that cuts evenly and completely. Thus the end result is not likely to be evenly trimmed grass having a constant known height and grain pattern.
Also consider the effect of a roller that encounters a rock, a root or a small sized mound in the lawn surface. If that roller is firmly attached to the lawn mower body or is spring biased thereto to press down upon the lawn surface, the tendency is for the mower body to tilt and unevenly scalp the grass with rotary blade type mowers.
Furthermore, roller type mowers tend to be factory designed and therefore are quite expensive special purpose lawnmowers with a high cost which is out of reach to the large mass of homeowners. Thus, inexpensive roller mounts and preferably those that might be retrofit upon existing hand steered mowers of the type used by home owners are not found in the prior art.
Accordingly it is a general object of this invention to improve the state of the art by overcoming the aforesaid problems of the prior art.